The CWU 003.02 Suspension Lamp by PSLAB looks to have taken its inspiration from the Victorian era’s industrial revolution. What, with its pewter gray tint, powder coated aluminum finish, and distinctive cylindrical profile, the piece resembles an agglomeration of the millions of pipes and smokestacks it took to cover London in its signature 19th. century gray ash. It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to know that CWU’s place of origin is some 1,900 miles South and East, across the oft-clouded environs of Northern Europe to the high steppes of Lebanon, Beirut. Given the landscape of the former, I can only surmise that CWU takes its aesthetic cues from a global conception of the post-industrial era–one that pares down natural forms into an essential geometry.

CWU 003.02. Designed by PSLAB.

It’s also tempting to see the piece as an homage to a certain U.S. Senator’s hilarious simplification of the internet as “a series of tubes.” From this perspective, CWU could be read as symbolic of our astounding ability to disseminate information. Or perhaps it’s just modeled after an obscure Middle Eastern flower, blooming black and brilliant in the midst of the high Bekaa Plateau. Either way, CWU intrigues. The floral shape is achieved by beginning with a single, straight pipe and surrounding it with others bent at successively greater angles until a blooming or cascading effect is achieved, thus tricking the eye into seeing an apparently haphazard metallic branching.

I envision CWU gracing the heights of many a warehouse loft from Beirut to Berlin, though, in keeping with PSLAB’s appetite for commercial lighting solutions, it would also be apropos for international restaurants. I could certainly picture dining beneath its spiny profile on all manner of sea-borne foodstuffs, from mackarel to maguro, king crab to conch.

Via Interior Design.